Maria Vanessa Sancho Shimizu is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow and Reader in the sections of Paediatrics Infectious Diseases and Virology investigating the human genetic basis of life-threatening infections.
In 2012 Sancho-Shimizu joined Imperial College London as a Marie Curie Fellow, where she continued to work on herpes simplex encephalitis, and searched for other viral infections and invasive meningococcal disease.
She was appointed lecturer and UK Research and Innovation Future Leaders Fellow in 2021, and made associate professor in 2023.
To help in this endeavour and recruit patients, Sancho-Shimizu established a Biomedical Research Center Paediatric Infectious Disease Clinic at St Mary's Hospital.
[6] She found that 3.5% of patients who suffered from COVID-19-induced pneumonia have genetic defects, and over 10% of people with severe COVID-19 have antibodies that attacked their own immune system.